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politics

In Field Dates:

25 Oct 2017 to 31 Oct 2017

The recent Government change and the fact that the National party with the most votes of any single party didn’t end up governing, has caused the New Zealand media and some politicians to question the MMP (mixed member proportional) system.

We here at UMR Research recently polled 750 New Zealanders (nationally representative) to gain the public’s opinion on whether the MMP system should be retained or whether we should change to another system.

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The state of political polling
by Stephen Mills Executive Director UMR Research

The twin failures to predict David Cameron’s win in the 2015 UK election and now the Trump triumph have certainly damaged the reputation of political polling.

The world was expecting a Clinton presidency and , even so it seems, were the two candidates. Hillary Clinton barely campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin two key states she lost, presumably on the back of public and private campaign polling showing those states were solidly in her camp.

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In Field Dates:

31 Mar 2016 to 6 Apr 2016

There has been some debate among New Zealand political commentators about whether a candidate like Donald Trump could emerge in New Zealand. The underlying circumstances are sufficiently different to make this unlikely, at least in the next few years. New Zealand has not been as badly scarred by the global financial crisis as the United States. A decisive majority of New Zealanders have believed the country is heading in the right direction for almost all of John Key's term as Prime Minister.

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Despite the Prime Minister's comments it is unlikely that Malcolm Turnbull would be satisfied with John Key's limited policy ambitions.

Malcolm Turnbull said his New Zealand counterpart John Key was a role model in his first press conference as Prime Minister. He described Key as "achieving very significant economic reforms in New Zealand … by taking on and explaining complex issues and then making the case for them".

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UMR Research Director Stephen Mills describes how terrorism has influenced politics – both in New Zealand and in Australia (Dominion Post April 9 2015)

The impact of terrorism has played a part in many Western elections since 9/11.

In 2001 Australian Prime Minister John Howard was heading for likely election defeat.

He instead secured a comfortable victory by taking full advantage of the tense and fearful political climate that developed when the issue of (mainly Muslim) asylum seekers combined with the aftermath of 9/11.

In many elections it is likely that the small armies of strategists, media minders, advance people, advertising agencies, pollsters, data analysts and digital specialists on both sides just cancel each other out.

It is a political version of the mutually assured destruction principle. A party going into an election without this full set of modern political weapons would lose.